I'm Italian and I can read both French and Spanish well. On the surface they look like Italian with different words and different pronunciation. However when I try to write them I appreciate the differences in how the sentences are built. One gets unnatural results trying to write French and Spanish as if they were Italian.

English* is definitely* a different* language* even if some words are about the same. I marked* those words with an asterisk* . German is much more different* and difficult*.

Computer language metaphor. If you know Ruby you can immediately understand Python but you discover you can't write Python as if it is Ruby. People would laugh at your scripts (and where are all those blocks? Easier the other way around.) You also think you can understand Elixir but this is not really the case. It is difficult to understand Erlang